THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

In just under two weeks, on 24 Feb, I’ll be at the Universite de Lausanne in Switzerland, leading a one-day workshop for the English department of CUSO (Conference Universitaire de Suisse Occidentale) under the title of my latest scholarly mantra: Pluralize the Anthropocene! I’m looking forward to talking about how Anthropocene discourses are engaging with literary and cultural studies. There will be a morning workshop, several presentations by graduate students, and I’ll do a late afternoon talk on “Eco-Poetics in the Anthropocene.”

Before the workshop, I’ll circulate to the registered participants a little bit of my recent writing on the topic, including my chapter “Enter Anthropocene, circa 1610” in Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor’s new collection, Anthropocene Reading. Beyond that, to make things easy, I’m also circulating some of my open-source web writing. Follow along at home if you’d like!

Further reading for enthusiasts would include the rest of Anthropocene Reading, the latest volume by Stacy Alaimo, Exposed, Jeffrey Cohen and Lowell Duckert’s new collection, Veer Ecology, and many other excellent things.

[Now that I’ve got your attention I might remind you that books are never free, just as they are never singular: they are always collective products with both visible and invisible costs, benefits, and consequences in the world. In other words — support open-access publishing!]

I’ve been meaning to write more about both of these projects, but until I do that, here’s a quick note about two new open-access books recently published by the mad geniuses at Punctum Books. I’m pleased and proud to be part of both, and hope that they find lots of happy readers!

How We Write is a collaborative book edited by U. of Toronto medievalist Suzanne Conklin Akbari. It features thirteen essays by academics of many different stages in the profession, from grad students to senior professors, admitting to the real truths of their writing experiences. It’s not a book of advice but an experiment in shared exposure. Writing is a messy process, and this book shares the mess.

Oceanic New York, which I edited, started back in October 2013 as a symposium at St. John’s. The book is a collaboration between eighteen writers and artists who think together about the relationship between the Ocean and New York City. It features many wonderful experimental voices and images. I especially love the cover, designed for the book by artist Marina Zurkow, which may or may not represent on some symbolic level my commute to campus

Download both for free, or order inexpensive paperbacks, and while you’re at it support open-access publishing and Punctum Books.

The first story in this amazing book is one I always love: an old sailor on icy seas, looking for home but not finding it because “seafaring is seafodder heart / humbling” (26).

I can make my sorry tale right soggy truth. (25)

Blow wind / blow, anon am I. (25)

The second story is the true history of the “Left-to-Die Boat,” packed full of Algerian refugees, seen but not rescued by assorted NATO vessels in March 2011.

Show me the wind. (46)

Caroline Bergvall’s Drift was my first post-grading book of the summer. It was so good that I stayed up late to finish it, then re-read it twice more the next two nights. Gorgeous, intricate, impassioned writing. Bits of it may figure in my NCS talk in July, which is also about the Seafarer — but for now I want to luxuriate in its rawness, its ambition, and its willingness to engage.

Let the tides shake your life. (110)

There’s so much to love in this mash-up of of twenty-first century tragedy and Anglo-Saxon lament. Bergvall mines the medieval poem “The Seafarer” for the core experience of oceanic disorientation, the bitter flavor of that “salt of the mind” (159), the partial recompense of the “ship of song” (144),

Page 6

For a minute there I lose myself. (42)

She starts with some line drawings before the poem begins.

One of the places she takes us is “hafville.” “Did not know where I was going hafville. Had fear wildering hafville” (42). We are not alone there:

Major Tom hafville

Li Bai hafville

Rimbaud hafville

Shelley hafville

Amelia Aerhart hafville

Jeff Buckley hafville

Spalding Gray hafville…

Later on, in the Log section, she tells us what hafville is: “sea wilderness, sea wildering” (153).

To north oneself. To come to song. (156)

She paints my favorite picture, the image of shipwreck, with words. The word-wreck starts with a few lost letters:

We mbarkt and sailed but a fog so th but a fog so

th but a fog so th th th th thik k overed us that we could scarcely see

the poop or the prow of the boa t (37)

A few pages later everything’s lost (40-41).

Shipwreck (Pages 40-41)

And eventually found again:

For a minute there I lost myself Totally at sea lost myway tossed misted

lost mywill in the fog hafville my love (42)

I also love the long set of Navigation instructions (140, 142, 146, 158 (x2), 160). They range from the practical

Stay calm (14)

to the historical, in her last entry, “Medieval navigation” (160), which finishes with

When you dive into cold water, it pushes the wind out of you. The icy shock holds you still, just for an instant. You slide beneath the waves into water’s slippery grip, and then lurch back up onto unsteady feet. Now everything’s different. The air bites exposed skin, but it isn’t just the cold or even the wind raking the lake into ragged swells. Something else. Your breath comes in near-frantic wrenches, and you can nearly feel some hidden motions inside your body, some awakened fire, constricted now inside loose ropes of cold. The lakewater has encircled your body, taken you whole – that’s what immersion means – but after you stand up it gradually sloughs itself away. Second by second your breathing reasserts its rhythm. You plunge under a second time, and the cold comes back, but nothing like the first shock.

Early Saturday morning, before my first-ever presentation at Kalamazoo, Lowell Duckert and I went swimming in Lake Michigan. As I usually am, I was seeking meaning. Does it make sense to read frigid immersion as allegory, to say that my scant thirty hours at the Medieval Congress, perhaps five of which were spent sleeping, embody the same impulse as plunging into the cold waters of the Third Coast?

A maiden knight arrives

Lowell, post-immersion

As an early modernist who’d never been there, I was curious about Kalamazoo. It shouldn’t have been all that exotic – the gap between the periods isn’t that wide, and anyway I’m close to the Sidney and Spenser Kzoo sub-cultures via my first book on romance. Plus the elemental hospitality of the BABEL/ITM/MEMSI/etc flowed through every hour. To paraphrase Jeffrey’s introductory remarks from “The Future We Want,” medievalists and early modernists are better served by seeing each other as alternate sympathies than rival claimants to a pre-modern throne. He sees a chasm between the sub-fields that needs to be bridged, and I’m also tempted to imagine a border across which sorties can sally and trade flourish, but in any case it seems more fun to be on both sides.

Even so, I felt vaguely alien upon arriving at the Congress. The sense that everyone else knew where they were going was part of it. Navigating the foreign WMU campus Friday afternoon to get to my first session seemed Spenserian and allegorical. (Should I say Dantesque instead? Romain de la Rose-like? Spenser is my go-to allegorical marker, but not the only one.) The ground was charged with meanings. The first living creature I encountered on campus was a goose. Symbol of fun? Or the need to extend our circle of attention beyond human actors? Of seasonal migrations? It was raining, and I hadn’t packed an umbrella or raincoat. The first human I recognized was Jeffrey Cohen, driving his rental car slowly down a campus drive. He rolled down his window, spoke my name, smiled, and drove off, leaving me in the rain. Meaning…what, exactly?

A symbolic object?

Allegories must be interpreted!(via Chris Piuma & Jonathan Hsy)

During a busy spring of manyconferences, I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between individuality and community. The productive tension between the one and the many has been on my mind for a long time, and thinking back on my trip to Michigan, I have the sense that Kzoo might enable a slightly different response to this endless conundrum. Unlike the annual conferences I regularly go to – SAA, MLA, less often RSA – it’s always in the same place. To my fellow conference goers, many of whom happily rattled off their Kzoo numbers – 12 years straight! 13! 5! 20! – it clearly felt like home.

Like a first-time reader of an over-abundant text, Malory or Dante or Chaucer, I searched for ways into the overwhelming numbers & flavors & ideas on diplay. The goose started things off, and then it wasn’t long before I’d spotted a few grad school friends and eased into the familiar pattern of academic conferences: found the registration table, looped a badge around my neck, arbitrarily narrowed my list of four intriguing sessions down to one.

I ended up choosing what felt like the most Kalamazoo-ish panel, La Belle Compagnie’s “How Shall a Man be Armed?” a live demonstration and modeling of English armoring practices during the Hundred Years War. My BABEL-y and theoretical friends wondered if I was poking fun at medievalism by choosing that panel. And perhaps I was a little, as I retold the story at happy hour, but the truth is I love experiential learning and the pressure living bodies put on ancient structures. I really can’t get enough of that stuff – which is one reason I love teaching with live theater and also why I launched my maritime scholarship by learning to climb the rigging and set the sails on the tall ships at Mystic Seaport back in 2006. The Armor panel was wonderfully dense and awash in technical details, including the influence of Italian and French fashions on English armor designs. (I thought it was good evidence for the claim that modern men’s fashions evolved out of armor.) The panel featured, in the four stalwart men gradually being dressed from foot to helm, a full helping of bodily presence, the force of “now” infiltrating historical expertise. Plus some good jokes, intentional or not: one knight’s beaver kept falling down and interrupting the presenter. It showcased the sometimes awkward fit of scholarly technical precision and fan-boy enjoyment. I could only get to one session as a audience member, but it was a good one.

How Shall a Man Be Armed?

Fellowship

As at NCS last summer, thecommunal virtue I wanted to think through at Kzoo wasfellowship. I’d done my homework and read a little David Wallace, and I was interested in testing the rough assumption that, compared to my home waters at SAA, Kzoo was more fellowship-full, less hierarchical, more interdisciplinary, and extended across different kinds of intellectual space. That’s a caricature of SAA, but an interesting fantasy about Kzoo.

In many ways, unsurprisingly, the two conferences are more alike than not. I was struck, though here I might be reading from my own private Kzoo, driven by BABEL, MEMSI, etc., by a deep attention to social organization and institutionalization beyond the panels. After seeing men armed, I went from BABEL happy hour -> MEMSI dinner -> BABEL party at Bell’s Brewery. I’ve seldom felt so well taken care of at a conference or so thoroughly awash with fellow-feeling. (At SAA I sometimes consciously shift between different sub-discourses, which I didn’t at all at Kzoo.)

My favorite moments at dinner were watching Jeffrey move from insisting, as drinks were served, that it would be “impossible” to put together another set of MEMSI panels for next year’s Kzoo, because he was out of ideas, to watching him assemble, before dessert, a twenty-speaker mega-panel on “The Impossible.” (My word, supplied by Lowell, is “dry.” Impossible & undesirable, but something we covet and value. Though I now wonder if “memory” has already been taken?)

Bell’s is definitely a place to which I’d like to return. The logistics of the pre-panel swim the next morning trimmed the wind from my sails Fri night, but it’s an excellent spot.

The Future We Want

The Cormorant and the Future

The panel I’d come to speak on, “The Future We Want,” dealt out six pairs and a wild card. The 10:00 am time was perfect for a pre-talk lake swim, a quick 60 miles west, before fiddling with flash drives and slideshows.

It was odd that none of the other panelists took up our offer to join us for a dip. Maybe they were waiting in a different hotel lobby at 6 am?

The talks rolled over us like so many cars in a freight train, roaring westbound, peering through fog, monkey at the wheel. I’ll sprint through them in an early modernist spirit of competitive evaluation:

The best presentation came first, Anne Harris and Karen Overby’s gorgeous meditation on optical lushness and the gifts of Art. I craned my neck backward to stare at the slides.

Better than all the rest was Arayne Fradenburg and Eilleen Joy’s rich evocation of institutional freedoms and futures. No one was surprised when they admitted their talks had been ghost written by frozen kobolds held deep underground, where they spend their dark days digging for possibilities.

My favorite was by Alan Mitchell and Will Stockton, who wasn’t really there. They brought the devil to the party and showed what happens when times and modes change.

Lowell Duckert and I may not have had the prettiest pictures, but we were the only ones to sing during our presentation.

None of the talks was better than Chris Piuma and Jonathan Hsy’s brilliant poetic meditation on containers and overflowing meanings.

I could not believe it when Julian Yates and Julie Orlemanski actually came to blows over the dynamic meanings of The Battle of Maldon. There was no way to top that level of commitment, so it’s good that they anchored our relay.

Actually the best part may have been the introductions. Wild-card Jeffrey likened each of us to a different literary genre, then sat in the front row with eyes blazing. Greedy glutton of imagination, lapping it up after lashing us all to the mast!

Cormorant sees the future

I see now, but didn’t yet realize as I wrote the talk, that the “various” I was celebrating via Milton’s fallen angel-bird was the difference I’d come to Michigan seeking, the fellowship poured into glasses and spread across campus lawns, the screech of newness in my ears. As usual with acts of discovery, what you find is mostly what you bring. But what I like about new conferences is the slight reshuffling of times and voices, the partially off-balance feeling created by available novelty, and the opening up of new ways.

In maritime historical circles, the idea of the Great Lakes as the Third Coast aims to supplement familiar narratives of “Atlantic history” and Pacific globalization with a different American story, one that enters slightly askew, via the St. Lawrence diagonally out of the northeast. This narrative connects the landlocked center of the continent to a distinctively northern maritime economy, trading furs and timber rather than cotton or sugar. This coast even — quelle horreur! — speaks more French than English, or at least it used to. Adding these fresh-water coastlines to our maritime narratives provides new trajectories for waterborne thinking.

That’s also what I like most about an early spring dip in great waters.

With my mind still whirling from the Ecologies of the Inhuman event last Friday, and while greatly enjoying all the post-event e-discussions — helpfully curated by Jeffrey at In the Middle — here’s my talk on shipwreck, Dylan’s new song “Tempest,” and post-equilibrium ecologies. The soundtrack to my talk was the title track of the new album, also named “Tempest.” I won’t paste in the audio clips I played, but I’ll show in the the images with their (now non-functional) audio prompts. I do recommend giving his 35th album a listen.

My talk opened with an instrumental clip, and then goes like this —

That’s the opening to Bob Dylan’s new waltz about the Titanic, titled “Tempest,” which will be my main text. But I’ll start with Michel Serres: “I live in shipwreck alert,” Serres writes. “Always in dire straits, untied, lying to, ready to founder’’ (124). I like this sentiment, but lately it’s been bugging me. It’s not quite right. It names my very deed of love for our inhuman environment but, as a Lear’s middle daughter might say, it comes too short

It’s not so bad inside shipwreck. It becomes easier if you stop hoping that there is solid ground somewhere. My point is that shipwreck — by which I mean the sudden shocking awareness that the vessels that have carried us this far are coming to pieces under our feet — represents a perfectly ordinary way to live. My stalking horse is global warming, but the underlying facts of disruption and disorder precede the anthropocene. Humans have been floundering about inside disorder for a long time. We’ve gotten good at inventing ways to reimagine disorder as order. As I’ve said elsewhere, that’s one of the things literature does well.

Living inside shipwreck sounds less comfortable than “shipwreck alert,” and one key difference involves attitudes toward change. In alert, we’re animated by paranoia and fantasies of structure. We’re pole-axed with dread, afraid of impending loss, melancholy with nostalgia for things we believe we have now. Inside shipwreck, by contrast, as the ship comes apart and water pours in, we’ve no time to waste and an urgent need to get used to being wet

Several things follow from global shipwreck. I’ll focus on three, via Dylan’s new song: The watchman. There is no understanding. The universe opens wide.

Slide and audio: The Watchman

He’s Dylan’s Prospero, appearing four times in this crowded song to guide disaster into artistic order. “The watchman, he lay dreaming…” goes the refrain: “He dreamed the Titanic was sinking.” The four watchman stanzas transform disaster into story, distant knowledge into bodily experience, epic possibility into unanswered need.

He watches but can’t tell.

In the historical metaphor the watchman is the one who missed the iceberg, and this figure demotes Prospero from controlling mage to passive dreamer. Shakespeare’s wizard captures fantasies of power, but Dylan’s watchman seals this figure up in an isolated crow’s nest. Nothing to do but watch.

Slide: NoUnderstanding

Shipwrecks are hard to narrate. As a different Shakespearean daughter bullies her father into acknowledging, the human response is sympathy: “O, I have suffered / With those that I saw suffer!” (1.2.5-6). Miranda asks her wizard-watchman-father to feel with her, and with us, to attune ourselves to what sailors fear.

Dylan’s “Tempest” sings Miranda down:

Audio: No Understanding

They waited at the landing

And they tried to understand

But there is no understanding

For the judgments of God’s hand.

No understanding. God’s hand behind the wizard’s curse. This is Bob’s Old Testament thunder-growl, but it sounds oddly freeing. Might it mean we don’t have to be on alert anymore? That we can turn to something else?

Slide: Opens Wide

No understanding is a dour sentiment, and maybe it’s just me who hears aesthetic hope in these lines. I don’t think the song leaves us in despair. That’s not the final force of shipwreck ecology. What if we turn from watchmen and from understanding and focus on overflowing abundance? Everybody’s on board the doomed ship: there’s Leo and Cleo, Wellington and Jim Dandy, Calvin, Blake, and Wilson, Davy the brothel-keeper, Jim Backus and the bishop, even “the rich man, Mr Aster.” The story unfolds through excess – who every heard of a 13-and-1/2-minute pop song, much less a waltz? It’s too much, too many fragments of story and experience and feeling. But it adds up to something –

Audio: Opens Wide

The ship was going under

The universe had opened wide…

There’s a basic eco-point here. Shipwreck names the core experience, the shock and pressure of the inhuman world on human skin. Being-in-the-world means living inside shipwreck. It’s the story we need to explain, can’t explain, and must tell. A direct encounter: ocean liner meets iceberg, human bodies splash into cold salt water. We want and can’t have distance, perspective, narrative, a story that explains and insulates.

We want the source. Tell me the cause, Muse! But we never get it.

The wetness of the encounter, the brute physicality of shipwreck, won’t let us understand causes. This song, this disaster, the oceanic histories and snatches of poetry that events like the Titanic open up, resonate without rest. The only stability is on the sea floor.

A shipwreck ecology, however, needn’t be a place only of horror or nostalgia. There’s ecstasy in the waters too. Not the relief of having survived or the satisfaction of figuring it out: those things don’t last. But an intellectual tingle that ripples out into the physical world, a willingness to confront the inhumanity of our environment, and an appetite for experience that doesn’t mind getting wet. That’s the direction named reality. And ecology. Also shipwreck.

I’m on my way to SAA in Toronto in the morning, but I’ll drop a couple paragraphs into the Bookfish’s mouth before I go. This is the opening and one other paragraph from a new article, that will appear at some point in JEMCS. It grew out of a great one-day conference at Columbia, Commons and Collectivities, back in May 2011.

The title is “‘Making the green one red’: Dynamic Ecologies in Macbeth, Edward Barlow’s Journal, and RobinsonCrusoe.”

We need a more colorful eco-palette. As ecological interpretations have become increasingly central to twenty-first-century literary studies, calls have emerged to move “beyond the green” toward a more variegated spectrum of environmental alternatives. What Jeffrey Jerome Cohen calls “ecology’s rainbow” refers to a current goal of the environmental humanities–to pluralize thinking about the relationship between human beings and nonhuman nature. My work in this area has flowed out of oceanic or “blue” ecologies, but the logic of dynamic ecological thinking cannot stop at the water’s edge.The need to multiply ecocritical models responds to an increasing recognition, which began in the ecological sciences and has emerged in the humanities and social sciences more recently, that natural systems are more dynamic and less stable than once believed. The logic that moves from stasis and sustainability to dynamic “post-equilibrium” models requires that we match the constant innovations of natural systems with flexible interpretive practices. With this pressure toward dynamism in mind, this essay reconsiders green—but not the old green. Remembering that green is an oceanic as well as terrestrial color, and using a famously opaque phrase from Macbeth as a linguistic cue to re-introduce complexity into our literary models of natural systems, this essay offers immersion in hostile waters as a structure within which to think about the human encounter with nonhuman nature. In this model, it is no longer a question of “being green,” but of enduring, with effort and difficulty, inside the “green one.”

And here’s another bit on plural methodologies —

The syntactic ambiguity of Macbeth’s phrase underscores the conceptual difficulty of the project of ecocriticism. Re-seeing the blue global ocean as both green and red creates a colorful mess that might confuse as much as clarify. But rather than attempting to smooth out the system—rather than trying to argue that blue or green or red is the real color of the ocean—this essay insists that the price of admission to this eco-conversation is accepting disorderly environments. To go with our more colorful eco-palette, we need an appetite for chaos. To perform this disorder in my own methods, I am going to explore three multi-hued seas in three texts with three different critical methods. First, I will read the oceanic green in a canonical text, through an exaggeratedly close reading of this particular phrase in Macbeth. Next, I will shift from the canonical to the archival and multi-media by highlighting a little-known episode from the manuscript journal of Edward Barlow, a seventeenth-century English sailor. Finally, I will turn away from traditional analysis to a critical mode that flows with narrative, re-telling as ecocritical allegory the shipwreck scene from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The hero’s travail from sea to beach, I suggest, represents the ecological encounter in a moment of crisis. These three texts and three critical methods together reveal the blue-red-green ocean as a hybrid space, a natural environment intimately connected to human bodies while also threatening their survival.

I started this book just as the lights went out during Hurricane Sandy, and I was so enthralled I kept reading by flashlight for a few hours. The latest work of oceanic history by John Gillis, The Human Shoremoves away from the islomania of his previous book, Islands of the Mind.

This new book is, as the title suggests, more human and coastal. Gillis begins his “alternative account of global history” (4) with the claim that human societies emerged and thrived across the littoral, taking advantage of the complex and fecund ecotones between land and sea. “Shores,” he writes, “were humankind’s first Eden” (38). Tracing the migratory patterns of early human history that follows the “kelp highway” (24) from Asia into North America and using the knowledge gained by recent work in “wet archeology” (28) that has found in now-flooded terrain evidence of ancient human habitations, this new history is “more amphibious than aquatic” (39) as it clearly traces humankind’s ancient debt to the sea.

A key distinction Gillis makes is the difference between living with and living on the coasts (98). To live on the coast means attempting to impose human structures and habits upon an unruly space; the day I started reading The Human Shore, my childhood haunts on the Jersey shore learned how transitory beach houses really are as huge waves rolled through their porches onto the streets behind. Living with coastal space, by contrast, might entail more temporary dwellings; a Times editorial soon after the storm that I can’t find right now emphasized that Native Americans hadn’t built permanent settlements on the barrier islands of New Jersey, though they did live there seasonally. These less heavy-footprinted practice amounts to a different attitude toward oceanic spaces —

Those who have learned to live with as opposed to just on coasts know that it is folly to believe that they are wholly in control of their own destiny. There are not fatalists, but they are respectful of tides and currents that set the tempo and scale of their world. In this respect, they are still like ancient foragers, more gamekeepers than the gardeners who regard it as their destiny to transform nature. (98)

The book narrates the histories of amphibious cultures from Vikings to Polynesian navigator to the Phonecians and the Malay “sea-gypsies.” It tells a story of the “second discovery of the sea” after the Romantic era, when Thoreau began calling the beach the “best natural place on earth” (172) and writers from Byron to Melville to Whitman and Dickinson hymn its sublime alterity. At times I though Gillis was more convinced that I am by W. H. Auden’s claim that Romanticism invented the modern sea, a claim that Jonathan Raban swallows whole in his oft-cited introduction to The Oxford Book of the Sea. Without minimizing the continuing force of the Romantic revolt, these writers no more invented the sea than Shakespeare, Lucretius, or Stephen Greenblatt invented the human.

I’m intrigued by the two-step process Gillis sees in our modern encounters with the sea, as “most Americans and Europeans became less physicall connected to the oceans…[but also] became more intimate with them mentally” (133). I think about this as a shift from a sailing culture, which relied on wind-born ships to enmesh local and global economies, to a swimming culture, in which the individual’s primary connections to the ocean are intimate, personal, and immersive. I’ve got an essay forthcoming on “Swimmer Poetics” that traces some of the implications of that contrast, and I’ve got more coming on that front.

This book ends with a rousing call to “abandon traditional blue-water assumptions that the oceans are elemental and timeless, and adapt what might be called a brown-water acknowledgment of the dynamic hybrid nature of our coastal water worlds” (198). Having recent written about “brown ecology” in another forthcoming essay, for Jeffrey Cohen’s Prismatic Ecologiescollection, I’m right with him here, though I also think a place remains for blue as the color of our watery globe.

It’s an exciting time to be working in the blue humanities, and I’m glad John Gillis is sailing in these waters. We spent some time together a few years back at a great conference he co-organized on maritime environmental history, which is generating a book that got me thinking about eco-heroism. My son Ian & I also spent a glorious afternoon with him on Great Gott Island off the coast of Maine in 2011. I love his littoral move in The Human Shore, and look forward to its influence on the oceanic humanities in many forms.

Last weekend’s periodization discussion made a sharp turn when Stephen Greenblatt’s modernization parable, The Swerve, won the MLA’s first annual Lowell prize for fiction. Those who, despite the seasonal upwelling of darkness-into-light stories at this time of year, remain unconvinced by zombie myths of Dark Ages and sudden lurches into modernity, have been outraged. Much cleverness and knowledge on display in the aftermath, including some lively FB & blog threads and on twitter, where Bruce Holsinger (@burnablebooks) warmed up the wires with a brilliant series of self-immolating tweet-quotations exposing the sillier claims of the book: see #TheSwerve.

The heart of this swervin’ exchange lays bare the conflict between two things: an objectively false feel-good story of “how the world became modern,” and a better-informed sense of what went on before Poggio found that copy of De rerum natura. The first thing is narrative, or perhaps myth; the other draws on the historical record.

I wonder what happens if we disentangle these threads? What if we rethink “modernity” as something other than a historical phenomenon? What if it’s a story?

The modern might not be a thing that “begins,” but a narrative humans tell about the felt experience of change. Discontinuity challenges any kind of systemic thinking, and “modernity” as a story makes sense of discontinuous change through the metaphor of the Break, the once-and-for-all transformation of what was into was is, or at least what is-becoming. This story gets told in crude and less crude formulations — The Swerve deserves mockery b/c it’s careless in its characterizations — but the modern-story can, perhaps, be retold to accommodate better representations of what precedes a modern-moment. A richer modernity story should also embrace the post-break fluidity that we mostly call postmodern. As Jameson sagely observes, any conception of modernity that cannot also explain postmodernity is pretty useless.

The four maxims Jameson lays out in A Singular Modernity (2002) are all pretty thought-provoking, actually. A quick paraphrase: “We cannot not periodize” “modernity is a narrative category” “modernity is not about subjectivity” “we need a modernity that also understands the postmodern.”

History itself does not and need not follow this modern parable. Any narrative about historical change-and-continuity must, in order to be a narrative, do some violence to the plenitude of the historical record. Some narratives are better than others; some work and others do not. I always prefer the flexible and recursive to the abrupt and enlightening, but that may be as much a generic preference for complexity and connection as an affinity for “reality,” that elusive thing. History overfills all human narratives; that’s why in addition to “facts” we need poetry — and geometry, statistics, economics, plasma physics, interior design, geoclimatology, the Hubble Telescope… Objects and alliances of all sorts, human and not.

I’m deeply sympathetic to the many eloquent defenses of medieval plenitude and cultural brilliance — the latest ones I’ve read include Anne Harris’ letter to the New Yorker when the pre-Swerve exerpt appeared, and Kellie Robertson’s scholarly prebuttal ofGreenblatt before the book reached print (Kellie Robertson)– but I retain interested in something like “modernity” (maybe we need a different word?) as a flexible narrative category that responds to cataclysmic change. The narrative of modernity, of course, needn’t be new in 1517 or any other special time; we can see its traces all over the literary-historical record, from Boccaccio to Chaucer, in Ovid, Lucian, and Achilles Tatius, and many others. I’m not an Anglo-Saxonist, but I read The Wanderer as a lament about the human pain that attends cultural change.

Whatever heroic story of “the modern” you want to tell — bold explorers, brilliant textual scholars, brave Lutherans, lethal viruses, high-caloric American food crops feeding China or Ireland — will exclude and misrepresent aspects of the historical record. That’s a reason to tell more complex and less triumphant stories.

My own favorite story about what it feels like to live inside modernity is shipwreck, which might be a Break but usually isn’t a triumph. Or at least it doesn’t feel like one at first.

What to do with a problem like periodization? How can we historicist literary types do justice to both the messy abundance of the past and our professional habit of transforming it into period-centered narratives?

I’ve been enjoying some lively periodic-chatter over the past three days, starting with Jeffrey Cohen’s short essay on the problems with “early modern”, to which I made a few comments & was joined by the always inspiringly polyglot Jonathan Hsy. Then came a Facebook flutter over a smart hatchet job in the LA Times Book Review of Greenblatt’s The Swerve, which ends with a utopian wish for a non-telological “history without transitions.” I don’t like cartoon versions of post- Middle Ages historical change any more than anyone else, — they don’t serve early modernists any better than they do medievalists — but I do like transitions, and don’t think we can do without them. We just need better, messier ones than the ones we’ve inherited.

The conversation continued yesterday with Rick Godden’s response to both the above links, with coda in favor of Hinch’s transitionless history. “I can think of worse things,” says Rick. Today Jeffrey’s taken to the twitterverse, insisting that Greenblatt give back his awards from The Swerve. (It really is a revolutionary medium…)

Without in any way defending heroic conceptions of early modernity that insist on leaping high by stomping on medieval plurality, I don’t want history without transitions. I like plurality, multiplicity, radical difference, but I also want narratives of change, transformation, discontinuity. I think both those things are historically true, in terms of recoverable facts and records of human experience. But how to have both at once?

Two quick ideas about different ways to do periodization:

1. Historical transitions are myths at least as much as history. The felt shape of historical change, as recorded in many different cultural forms, responds to but also itself re-shapes historical experience. The idea of a “break” into early modernity doesn’t fit recorded facts, but it does express a lasting fantasy about patterns formed by accumulated historical events. Greenblatt didn’t invent that myth any more than Petrarch did. I don’t think either of their versions of the break does full justice to the historical record — I prefer shipwreck as a representation of early modern cultural change — but myths are always grist for our interpretive mill.

2. Always periodize — at least twice! With apologies to Jameson, we need periods and transitions, but also need to remember that we should not believe in them too much, that they always do some violence to the full (unknowable) plurality of historical experience. So what about a double (or more) system of periodization, which might be as simple as recognizing that all 21c critical work responds to 21c claims (“presentism”) as well as the demands of historical sources, or as sophisticated as remembering that historical periods never end in any conclusive way, that cultural habits of responding to historical stimuli layer themselves atop and alongside each other, intersecting and accumulating and recombining. With legible but messy transitions.

Some approximate numbers: about 40 feet tall, 60″ around at chest-height, 20″ in diameter. According to the growth multiplier for white pine, that means roughly 100 years old. Which takes us back to 1912, before my parents were born and before our house was built. I imagine the tree was planted to mark the northeastern corner of the rock wall that now borders our property. When it was built it marked the edge of the estate that then filled up almost all of our neighborhood, before smaller properties were carved out of it after WWII.

This tree’s life was not quite on a nonhuman time scale, but it’s been through a lot of storms, including some bigger than Sandy: Gloria in 1985 and the great storm of 1938, among others.

I’d been worried about storm surge, which turned out to be a bit less than Irene, though it still produced major flooding just a bit downhill from us. We’re all fine, but it’s odd that our damage came from being high, not low. This tree was probably one of the highest points in our little neighborhood, which exposed it to the full force of the east wind. We’re very lucky it didn’t fall on the house, though a little playhouse we put in for the kids years ago is underneath it. Still standing, as far as I can tell.

The tree came down around 7 pm, two hours after the power cut out. I was sitting on that side of the house with the kids telling stories when we heard a muffled thump and then a sharp bang. We jumped up away from the window, but the bang turned out to be just the power cable getting ripped off the wall. It was dark and hard to see, but as we peered through the glare of our flashlights, we eventually could make out the dark outline of a huge shape, lying sideways along the yard. We figured out what it was by looking at the hole in the skyline, visible by the full moon, on the corner of the property where the tree had been.

A few hours earlier, in the last of the power, I’d watched the Fangorn scenes from The Two Towers with the kids. Eald enta geworc, goes the Anglo-Saxon verse line from which Tolkien invented his tree-herders. The old work of giants.

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Congratulations to literature scholar, digital humanities innovator, and two-time @NEH_ODH grantee Dr. Katherine Rowe, named the new president of the College of @williamandmary. https://t.co/EFDCzeKEX5